In its efforts to shore up supply chain transparency, the German multinational luxury vehicles manufacturer BMW announced its intentions to extend its blockchain-powered supply chain solutions to around ten suppliers worldwide, an official press release confirmed the news on Tuesday.
The BMW Group has always believed in the active incorporation of new technologies to ensure best-in-class service for its upper-class clientele. Last year in April, it launched a blockchain-empowered car protection app that addresses odometer frauds in second-hand vehicles.
BMW’s Partchain project puts supply chain transparency back in focus
Taking its trust and reliance on the blockchain a notch further, BMW has decided to improve its entire supply chain transparency and ensure complete traceability of vehicle components and raw materials by offering its suppliers a chance to become a member of the “Partchain” project.
As a part of the project, BMW will be able to verify the end-to-end supply chain process of raw material or component with a click of a button. It will offer complete supply chain transparency to all the stakeholders involved, right from mining raw materials, vehicle manufacturing, sales, and distribution to the end-users.
Andreas Wendt, who is a member of the board of management of BMW AG and heads the Purchasing and Supplier Network, explained the challenges existing in the automobile industry today. The international supply chain of a single automobile is quite complicated. There are numerous stakeholders involved at every stage, and each of them ends up recording and managing their own data separately, he explained.
To be able to backtrack a supply chain involves a considerable amount of manual efforts, and this is what we are trying to address with the PartChain project, Wendt asserted.
With a blockchain-based process, we can instantly verify a series of transactions or collection of data recorded in the supply chain process.
BMW embraces blockchain with a renewed focus on supply chain digitization
Commenting further on what issues the project aims to tackle, Wendt remarked that when the firm piloted this initiative in 2019, the focus was solely placed on enhancing supply chain transparency in spare parts. However, with this move, we are going to take supply chain digitization to the next level, he added confidently.
Together with blockchain technology, which ensures manipulation-proof storage of data and transactions across millions of computers at one time, BMW’s PartChain project will deploy cloud-based technologies by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Our ultimate goal is to build an open platform that facilitates the seamless, secure, and accurate flow of data within the supply chains across the globe. And that’s how we will attain one hundred percent supply chain transparency, Wendt concluded.
